I cannot tell you how happy I am that you have found this. I had long suspected that an Attic (or Koine?) paraphrase of Homer must exist somewhere, just as, for example, a Homeric paraphrase of the Gospel of John was written by Nonnus. I am thrilled to finally find it.

For the last year or so, I have been intrigued by the potential of using simplified Greek paraphrases as an alternative to Grammar-Translation pedagogy. A few books have come out recently which use levelled readings of Ancient Greek texts, and I have been posting my own levelled readings here on Textkit. To the extent that Homer remains a difficult text, especially to those of us who began studying Greek with Attic or Koine, an Attic paraphrase is a de facto levelled reading. It is also an alternative to looking up rare Homeric vocab in a lexicon. It is an alternative to a grammatical note in English. It is an alternative to looking at an English translation. All these these things may be helpful or even necessary in the early stages of learning Greek, but I have come to despise them. I yearn for a way to improve my Greek without ever leaving Greek, and this is exactly what the Attic parallel text of Homer does.

I have only had a chance to read a dozen or so pages, but I can already tell that this will be a wonderfully helpful text for me. The Attic paraphrase cannot really be called easy, but because I already know the Homer text well, I can read it smoothly and quickly, and it will help me further master Homer while at the same time giving me much reading practice in Attic which is comprehensible input.

Again, thank you so much for tracking this down. I'll post some further thoughts down the road as I read more. This is really an early Christmas gift for me. χάριν δὴ δίδωμι σοι!!!!

The book was published in 1811, edited by one Nikolaos Theseus, but the paraphrase was written by the 15th century Native Greek Humanist Theodorus Gaza. It makes sense that his "Attic" would show some interference from what would become Modern Greek. To me the paraphrase is wonderful, simple but elegant, vibrant and full of intepretive insights. Some examples: πόδος ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς becomes ὁ τοὺς πόδας Ἀχιλλεύς and δίος Odysseus is ὁ ἔνδοξος. πολυφλοιβος is πολυταραχος. The crux ὑπόδρα ἰδών is given a more specific interpetation ταυρηδὸν ἀπιδὼν. If you get thrown by a less contracted Homeric form like κέλεαί με, Gaza will help you out by giving you the more familiar προστάττεις με.

What makes Homer hard is the rare vocab and unusual forms, and what makes Attic hard is the long sentences with complicated syntax. The Attic paraphrase uses familiar vocab but the sentences, like the original, are short and syntactically simple. This makes the paraphrase easy to read and a wonderful "crib" for learning Homer. It's a form of "cheating," I suppose, but cheating with Greek.

A side note: I have been working on my own Koine paraphrase of the Iliad. I have not gotten very far, but here is my first line, which I wrote before seeing this text.

In many ways, of course, reading Gaza is like reading the sxolia, but I find it more fun and less tedious and more helpful in building up both my Epic and Attic Greek.

I'm really surprised that Gaza is not more a part of the standard pedagogy for learning Homer. Again, I had never heard of him until Bedwere found him on google books. How well known is he? The wikipedia article, by the way, does not mention his paraphrase.

the Greek is more modern than Attic in its word patterns etc, it has typical problems you see in Katherevousa everywhere, which is a shame.

Actually, having read more of the paraphrase, I do not find any traces of Demotic, but it appears to be a pretty pure, if somewhat simple, specimen of Attic. Are you sure you are not refering to the preface? That was written in 1811 by the editor, not by Gaza. That does seem to be a mixture of ancient and Demotic. I found it largely intellegible, although I do not read Modern Greek.

For the ἠύτε νέβροί of 4:243, Gaza gives καθάπερ ἐλάφρων γενήματα. I could not help but think of the γεννήματα ἐχιδνῶν of Mt. 3:7. So far, I have not seen any other Christian echoes, which tend to occur in these Byzantine scribes.

As a good paraphrase should, sometimes one word is rendered with two: πένθος in 4:197 is λύπη καὶ θρῆνος.

Ever helpful to the struggling Greek learner, Gaza changes a gnomic aorist into a present, and supplies a missing substantive:

Homer 4:161: σύν τε μεγάλῳ ἀπέτισαν...

Gaza 4:161: σὺν μεγάλῳ τόκῳ ἀποτίσουσι...

For some reason the unaugmented ἴδε of, for example, 4:149, is consistently retained in the paraphrase and not changed to εἶδε. I wonder if this is Byzantine orthography reflecting iotacism.

It's all about variety. Gaza does a masterful job of always tweaking the text just enought to make the paraphrase a little different from the original. Sometimes (4:329) one Homeric word (πολύμητις) is replaced by another Homeric word (πολύβουλος.) An ιζω verb becomes a contract verb, and after a secondary sequence, the subjunctive is used instead of an optative:

Homer 4:300 ὄφρα...τις...πολεμίζοι

Gaza 4:300: ὅπως...τις...πολεμῇ

And sometimes there are just slight changes in word order to keep things interesting:

The effect of this constant stylistic variety--the same effect one gets whenever one reads several versions of the same Ancient Greek text--is the conviction that the Greeks loved variety for variety's sake, and more often than not, word order, the tenses, synonyms, connective/particles, et. al. are used not to create fine semantic distinctions, but for euphony and style, what I call semantic minimalism.

A good paraphrase helps you appreciate the original, as when a great pun is lost.

I read a few lines of the original. Now, I know Homeric Greek fairly well, but I have not mastered the entire Iliad. Often I can understand a sentence fine, but there may be a word or two that I don't know (or have forgotten.) Sometimes I understand the essence of the sentence, but the precise grammar eludes me, and there are still some passages that I fail to process entirely. So, after reading the original. I scan my eyes over to the Attic paraphrase. So far, in almost every instance, the paraphrase answers my questions, and then I can scan my eyes back to the original, and now I understand it fully. Now, sometimes it works the other way around. I don't quite understand every word of the paraphrase, but since more often than not, I DO understand the original, this helps me unpack the paraphrase. I guess it would be like someone who was learning both Greek and Latin and used a Greek-Latin diglot to improve both languages. I have found very few times where I understand NEITHER the paraphrase nor the original. After reading both texts, I rarely feel like I HAVE to look anything up in English, and that one cannot put a price on.

But beyond the incredible value (to me, anyway) of the text as alternative to Cunliffe and the Loebs and even Geoffrey Steadman, we can raise the question of the value of the paraphrase itself. Would I recommend it, for example, to someone who has no interest in learning Homer but wants some good reading in Attic or Koine? Yes, I think I would, because the paraphrase strikes me as fairly easy Greek and fairly good Greek, a combination which is always hard to find. But I wonder if the text only seems easy to me because I know Homer well, and I wonder if many people might find the artistic value of Gaza less than appealing. It is, after all, a type of translation, and we know that Homer does NOT translate well, into say, English. (Alexander Pope happens to be one of my favorite poets, but I find even his translation of the Iliad awful. I've never found a translation that works for me.) I wonder if some people will find Gaza's prose, compared to the unmatched poetry of the original, disappointingly prosaic. Will some people--maybe folks whose Greek is better than mine--have the same reaction reading Gaza that I do when I read one of those paraphrases into modern English of Shakespeare?

And I should also admit that maybe the reason the Attic paraphrase works so well as a way for me to brush up on my Homer without ever leaving the target language is because I have already read most of the books of the Iliad several times using the traditional methods--looking up words in LSJ, reading the grammatical notes of Benner and Draper, using the Loebs. I wonder how well Gaza's crib would work at the beginning stages of learning Homeric Greek. Is it, that is, a real alternative to grammar-translation or something that one graduates to from grammar-translation?

Well, I am playing the devil's advocate here. I am convinced that this is the single best Homeric resource I have ever seen. But I wonder about the lack of its use. As far as I can tell, the only edition of the text is this one, done just about two hundred years ago. I, for one, have never seen Gaza's glosses referred to in the standard references works, even though he is more useful than, for example the sxolia, because Gaza helps unpack the difficult text rather than adding extra arcane information. I can find virtually nothing about him on-line. And what about the other Byzantine paraphrases of Homer? I cannot find ANY edition of these.

I suspect the lack of Gaza's popularity is a result of the pedagogical bias against using anything other than "real Greek" to teach Greek. Purists, rather than pragmatists, still dominate Greek pedagogy.

To make use of Gaza means one has to trust him to explicate the text via paraphrase. Reading him I get the sense that he deeply understands Homer, that he, like me, struggles and rejoices in the poet. I don't really know WHY Gaza wrote his paraphrase. I can only imagine how much work is was and I thank God for him. I cannot help but feel that he wrote the text, somehow, for people like me in mind.

By the way, you can get the text printed by the Expresso Book Machine for around $15.00 a volume.

Wow there is...a lot here, if you're still interested in my opinion, to respond to. I think I'll have to take some time and formulate a coherent response of decent length with some examples, fortunately I've kept some of my notes on him.

A few minor points though about the level of pragmatism in current methodology: it depends, its very good at its major point, that is training philologists. For those who just want to read Greek without needing to learn about syntaxis, morphology and phonology to a deep level and who won't need to go onto semantics, lexicography, metrics, textual editing etc then yes I agree its severely outdated. But then I teach would be Classicists and, say, those just interested/Theology students with different methods.

Th.G vs the Scholiasts: I disagree, from an academic and contextual pov, as for just picking up and reading it depends on how good your Attic is. For beginners who are being trained mainly on Homer I suspect this would be confusing. I've tried using Attic paraphrases of the Odyssey to teach those who started in Attic...it kind of works but I think its better to keep going over the text until they naturalise it, always asking questions e.g "who amongst the gods dislikes Odysseus?" "why does Odysseus not walk back with Nausicaa?", that forces people to pay attention.

Wow there is...a lot here, if you're still interested in my opinion, to respond to. I think I'll have to take some time and formulate a coherent response of decent length with some examples, fortunately I've kept some of my notes on him.

A few minor points though about the level of pragmatism in current methodology: it depends, its very good at its major point, that is training philologists. For those who just want to read Greek without needing to learn about syntaxis, morphology and phonology to a deep level and who won't need to go onto semantics, lexicography, metrics, textual editing etc then yes I agree its severely outdated. But then I teach would be Classicists and, say, those just interested/Theology students with different methods.

Th.G vs the Scholiasts: I disagree, from an academic and contextual pov, as for just picking up and reading it depends on how good your Attic is. For beginners who are being trained mainly on Homer I suspect this would be confusing. I've tried using Attic paraphrases of the Odyssey to teach those who started in Attic...it kind of works but I think its better to keep going over the text until they naturalise it, always asking questions e.g "who amongst the gods dislikes Odysseus?" "why does Odysseus not walk back with Nausicaa?", that forces people to pay attention.

Well, as I've said, there is considerable overlap between what Gaza is doing and the what the Scholiasts do. In fact, as I understand it, some of the other Byzantine paraphrasers of Homer were themselves Scholiasts. But if nothing else, having the glosses directly opposite the text, without having to go to a separate book, is invaluable. I hate breaking up the flow of reading Greek by having to go to lexicons and commentaries and translations. For some reason, switching back and forth between Homer and the paraphrase does not have that same feel, since it is all reading in Greek. It's what advocates of Reader's Editions call "arm chair Greek." And of course the Scholists, due to their elliptical style, are not themselves easy reading.

...as for just picking up and reading it depends on how good your Attic is. For beginners who are being trained mainly on Homer I suspect this would be confusing.

Yes, as I've said, for a paraphrase to have pedagogical utility, it must be "leveled" appropriately to the learner. For me. Gaza's level is a good one, and I suspect he woud work well for the many people out there whose Attic/Koine is better than than their Epic. (I do think a very simplifed Homeric Greek paraphrase opposite the original text woud still be good for beginners, and should be introduced right from the beginning as an alternative to the grammar-translation helps, but that's another question.)

We've talked about this before on Textkit, whether there is "interference" between the dialects to the point that they should not be learned at the same time. I would only say that another advantage of this book is that it gives you a side by side comparision of Attic (or, really Koine, since Gaza's "Attic" is very much simplified, and was of course written very late) and Homeric Greek. In doing this, I have concluded that Homeric Greek is harder than I had thought. Bottom line, the paraphrase is much easier to read in most instances. I know that Clyde Pharr argues the opposite, that Homeric Greek is easier than Attic, but comparing the sentences, on is struck with three things that make Homeric Greek tougher than Attic. 1. The word order. 2. the variety of forms, and the fact that more forms overlap. 3. the lack of the article which makes breaking down the syntax harder. 4. the more varied vocab.

Now, Homer's Greek is of course indescribably better than Gaza's Greek, but again it is surprising to me how much having the paraphrase does not distract one from Homer (as does, at least for me, grammar-translation,) but seems rather to be a natural way to expound him.

I've tried using Attic paraphrases of the Odyssey to teach those who started in Attic...

Gaza’s expansive, explanatory, rendering of 6:336 gets the psychology of Homer just right.

Hector chides Paris' for withdrawing from the battle after he loses the duel to Menelaus, a duel that would have ended the war. Hector says it’s not right for Paris to be mad at the Trojans—after all, he is the cause of the war. Paris replies that it is not anger that has caused him to withdraw, but something else is going on in his psyche. Homer uses just four words

Gaza 6:336: ἐβουλόμην δὲ ἐκ τῆς συμβάσης μοι λύπης ἐκ τῆς ἥττης παρατροπήν τινα καὶ παραμυθίαν εὑρεῖν, καῖ εἶξαι τῇ συμφορᾷ, καὶ ἡσυχᾶσαι."Rather, I wanted to find a certain distraction and consolation from the pain that came to me from my defeat, and I wanted to yield to the misfortune, and to be still.”

As with Achilleus, Paris shame and anger leads to withdrawal and inactivity—depression, really. Both heroes recognize that you cannot give in to grief, but Achilleus does so too late to save himself and his friend, and thus the tragedy.

Gaza reminds me of the Amplified Bible, a paraphrase and commentary rolled into one.

Reading through these volumes (How difficult a task on the computer!) I am struck by a very interesting idea, would it not be interesting to take en masse the Homeric type scenes, feasting, drinking, praying, arming etc and teach students those before sending them off into the poem? I wonder if that would make it easier, or harder. It struck me at TG's handling of such scenes.

There is another paraphrase attributed to the Byzantine scholar Michael Psellos and printed as an appendix to Scholia in Homeri Iliadem by Bekker. It seems to be more compact, although I am not competent to judge its quality:

There is another paraphrase attributed to the Byzantine scholar Michael Psellos and printed as an appendix to Scholia in Homeri Iliadem by Bekker. It seems to be more compact, although I am not competent to judge its quality:

But sometimes Psellos is more expansive, and here he departs from Homer by slightly changing the metaphor.

Homer 10:457: φθεγγομένου δ’ ἄρα τοῦ γε κάρη κονίῃσιν ἐμίχθη. (“While he was still speaking, his head was mixed with the earth.”)Gaza 10:457: τοῦτου δε λαλοῦντος , ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῖς χώμασι συμεμίγη. (“While he was still speaking, his head was mixed together with the dust.”) Psellos 10:457: λαλοῦντος δὴ τοῦτου, ἡ κεφαλὴ τῇ γῇ ἡνώθη. (“While he was still speaking, his head became one with the dust.”

Quite often we have three different versions of a word or phrase, for example the monument of Ilius in 10:415: σῆμα (Homer,) μνῆμα (Gaza,) and τάφος (Psellos.)

Both paraphrases are great, both are exceedingly helpful. I personally prefer Gaza’s consistent habit of using two words to convey Homeric words which often have two shades of meaning. But this produces a style that is sometimes clunky and reveals itself as “translationese.” Some may prefer Psellos’ crisper style, at once closer to the original and probably of higher literary value as a stand alone work of art. Both texts, written hundreds of years apart and long after Attic was supposed to have died, strike me as perfectly good specimens of Ancient Greek, with little or no interference from Demotic.

Bedwere began this thread by referring to a dream he had of an Attic parallel text. My dream would be to have something like those multi-text parallel Bibles that they make. I have one that has the Greek text with seven facing translations. How about a volume that would have Homer and Gaza AND Psellos and several Modern Greek versions? An early Demotic version would almost be equivalent to a Koine version. Are there katharevousa versions available? Now, that would be a dream come true. As on demand publishing gets more sophisticated, this would become increasingly possible. But I’m grateful for what we have, and again thank you guys for finding these texts.

chalimac wrote:

It's a pity that none such paraphrase survives for the Odyssey. It would be something like this:

Very nice. My own experience has been that paraphrasing Ancient Greek texts is a very effective way to improve one’s own Greek. How to explain that we have several paraphrases of the Iliad but none of the Odyssey? It does seem that the Iliad was more highly thought of by the Byzantines, the school book of Greek par excellence.

How to explain that we have several paraphrases of the Iliad but none of the Odyssey?

I'm afraid the answer lies in military values. In the "education" of children the Iliad lends itself to patriotic/militaristic readings much more easily than the Odyssey. Actually, the Odyssey has not been appreciated in all its nuances until recent times (Joyce for instance).

An early Demotic version would almost be equivalent to a Koine version.

I’m experimenting with different ways of using this extraordinary text.

I chose a book (10) with which I am pretty unfamiliar. I had only read book 10 one time, several years ago, and I did not remember the plot. I read through the paraphrase once, not looking anything up, and not looking at the Homeric text at all. I could understand about 90% of the paraphrase. Then I read through the paraphrase again, this time glancing over at Homer to help me unpack the few passages I could not get. This worked about half the time. Then I read through the book a third time, reading a passage from Gaza (with which by this time I was quite familiar) and then reading the Homer. The extra familiarity with the underlining meaning of the Homeric text, which I had absorbed through several readings of the paraphrase, made understanding the Homeric text even easier. At this point, in just a few places, I did use a lexicon and look at the English translations, once or twice because I was truly stuck, more often just to nail down the more precise meaning. Then, finally, I read through the book once last time, this time reading only the Homer, and referring back to the paraphrase only when I got stuck.

This was a remarkably painless and fun to way to read Homer. Above all, as I said at the outset, I am thrilled to read Homer without leaving the target language. I don’t think this text would allow anyone to dispense all together with lexicons and grammar notes and translations, but it does allow one to use these minimally. It creates a Greek immersion reading environment that breaks out of grammar-translation.

I am currently reading book 11 and my practice is to switch off. On one page I read the Homer first, and then read the paraphrase, and on the next page I reverse the method. Reading Gaza first is much easier, requiring less effort, but I do think it is a mild form of “cheating.” Reading the Homer first forces you to process out the more difficult Greek, and I don’t want to relay too much on even a Greek “crutch.”

I’m also now referring to Psellos’ paraphrase from time to time, either when I get stuck on a passage or when I am curious to see his take.

chalimac wrote:

An early Demotic version would almost be equivalent to a Koine version.

gives a brief excerpt from 1:1ff, and Loukanis is perfectly intelligible to me even though I do not read Modern Greek. It appears that Loukanis' book is only available from Europe, and I believe it is facsimile of the original, whose ornate orthography is certainly interesting to look at in its own right, but the font, with even more ligatures than Theseus, would be somewhat difficult to read. I look forward to the day when all these texts will be printed in new, modern fonts.

Actually, the Odyssey has not been appreciated in all its nuances until recent times (Joyce for instance).

I go back and forth on which book is better. When I read the Odyssey I think it is better, more sophisticated in plot, structure, and language. But, as now, when I read the Iliad, I like it better. The language is more simple, less ornate, more direct and open air, but still masterfully intricate. It’s amazing to me that the first two books ever written in a European language remain the two best.

I would say that the Iliad has more moments of poetic intensity, some metaphors that will endure as long as humanity. However, it also has its share of dull passages and relentless gruesomeness. The Odyssey, I reckon, is a more rounded work and more attuned to modern sensibility in a global world of low-cost airlines. After all, to describe an experience we still say it was an "Odyssey" but never an "Iliad".

It's almost an exercise in amplification. It's astonishing how compact Homer is. It's like reading Tacitus or Seneca right before switching to some papal encyclical. The same line in the versio latina:

It's almost an exercise in amplification. It's astonishing how compact Homer is.

Yes, that's the thing about these intra-lingual versions. On the one hand, Gaza’s and Loukanis' expansiveness helps you unpack Homer, and for that one is grateful. But on the other hand these paraphrases make you appreciate the original like nothing else can, and yes, “compact” is exactly the word I would use to describe Homer’s genius. His Greek is the most pure--simple, clean and trim in exactly the way later Attic, not to mention English translation, is not.

The same line in the versio latina:Filiam autem mihi solvite dilectam, haec vero precia liberationis accipite

Yes, the Latin seems to betray Homer less than does the English. There’s a line from the Godfather: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

To what extent can this be used as evidence that quite often in Homer (and elsewhere?) the middle is used for metrical or euphonic reasons, and not to convey some fine semantic nuance? For that matter, do we have here evidence that γινώσκω/οἴδα and ὑπάρχω/ειμί and χρή/δεῖ are more or less equivalent in meaning?

Well, remember, part of the art of these paraphrases (especially for Gaza) is to produce a text slightly different from the original. But the answer for me to these questions is yes.

γινώσκω/οἴδα and ὑπάρχω/ειμί and χρή/δεῖ are more or less equivalent in meaning?

I am not qualified to answer about the middle voice or these lexical pairs. It must be a tough question considering there is a whole monograph called: Luther, the Translator, Rendering Γινώσκω and Οἴδα.

In doubt about usage or authenticity of style, I would blindly go with Psellos. One reason is that Psellos (1018-1078) is older than Gaza (1400-1475). The other reason is that he was pretty much considered the best Attic stylist in centuries. The Encomium of His Mother was studied as a model next to Demosthenes On the Crown in rhetorical circles. I think you are right in saying that his paraphrase stands better as an individual work of art.

γινώσκω/οἴδα and ὑπάρχω/ειμί and χρή/δεῖ are more or less equivalent in meaning?

No, we can't just assume things based on usage centuries, millennia, even apart. Its important to differentiate between synchronic and diachronic data. Now whether or not the differences are rendered well into English is a different thing entirely. To answer based on hist/comp philology too:

γινώσκω/οἴδα: Well, the latter is a perfect formation originally with the sense of I have seen....and from seeing I know (cf Lat: Video, Skt: vadati etc) whereas the former is a present tense, seems to be more conversational and often has an incipient meaning too. Generally one can use it for I know/understand/realise and stems from math form I learn. See also various compounds from lambainw for "I see" just like in modern Greek.

ὑπάρχω/ειμί: Well in general there is a difference between "to be" (einai) and "there is, there exists" etc. Erm I know this is common to most IE languages (again, see Skrt Asti vs bhavati) but I'm not necessarily sure as to the distinction even in modern Greek. Sometimes I use one, sometimes the other. I don't know, I just know when it...sounds wrong. I guess there are some obvious examples, you would not necessarily want to say the man uparkhei not an idiot etc.

χρή/δεῖ: honestly, can't think of a difference here. There probably is one.

The author is Manuel Gabalas (1271-1355) and its character is different from either Psellos or Gaza. It is not a literal word-for-word rendering, it skips passages and the adventures of Ulysses are in chronological order and narrated in third person. However it is faithful enough to allow the editors to pinpoint which lines of the Odyssey it paraphrases. For more info see the attached French paper and this one: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1 ... =367898131

All and all, I think it is a fantastic resource to study or to prepare teaching materials. Let's hope they publish the whole paraphrase someday. Luigi Silvano from the Institut für Byzanzforschung is supposed to be working on it.

Last edited by chalimac on Tue Mar 12, 2013 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The author is Manuel Gabalas (1271-1355) and its character is different from either Psellos or Gaza. It is not a literal word-for-word rendering, it skips passages and the adventures of Ulysses are in chronological order and narrated in third person. However it is faithful enough to allow the editors to pinpoint which lines of the Odyssey it paraphrases.

I think Loukanis' paraphrase is like this, not covering the entire Iliad but skipping around. Such versions do not allow one's eyes to scan back and forth quickly between the originial and the paraphrase. Still, I'm sure that Gabalas is worth taking a look at. I could not access his text because the link you provided wanted me to download a bunch of stuff on my computer. Maybe you could give us some sample passages right here in this forum to show us how Gabalas departs from the original. How about a few lines where you give us your own paraphrase as well?

Scribo wrote: Sometimes I use one, sometimes the other. I don't know, I just know when it...sounds wrong. I guess there are some obvious examples, you would not necessarily want to say the man uparkhei not an idiot etc.

Yes, I think this is the way English works and I assume Ancient Greek too. The choice of words is driven not always, maybe not usually, by semantic issues but by style-euphony-balance-tone. What "sounds right" now in English may sound funny in fifty years, and that drives choices in Ancient Greek as well.

chalimac wrote: In doubt about usage or authenticity of style, I would blindly go with Psellos. One reason is that Psellos (1018-1078) is older than Gaza (1400-1475). The other reason is that he was pretty much considered the best Attic stylist in centuries.

I am assuming that Gaza had access and made use of Psellos. Again, at many points they agree, but I'm not sure you would call Gaza a revision of Psellos. It appears that Gaza felt an even more expansive--what we would today call a more "user friendly"--text was needed. Neither paraphrase was an attempt to render the Iliad into the vernacular of the time; both seem to have mastered an archaizing Attic, but I assume both spoke a Demotic which was rather different from what they wrote.

In the four hundred years between Psellos and Gaza, I think the situation changed, moving closer to the what we face today. In antiquity, presumably, the average Koine speaker could more or less understand Homer without a paraphrase. Gaza was presumably writing to an audience whose Koine was better than their Epic, and regardless, needed lots of help to unpack difficult Homeric passages. I know that Gaza translated Greek works into Latin. Maybe Psellos was writing for people who, because they spoke Early Demotic, could more or less understand Attic, whereas Gaza was writng for people (like me) to whom Greek, whether Homeric, Attic or Demotic, was a foreign language.

Again, I see Gaza not as an ancient author, but rather as a full-fledged modern "help." I'm sort of on a mission to promote him as a pedagogical tool.

And rightly so! These texts should be used more in textbooks. Why withhold the Homer experience until students have mastered 2-3 years of Attic and one more to transition to Homeric? There is a lot of Homer left in Psellos, Gaza and Gabalas. Even attic schoolboys needed glosses and paraphrases to tackle him.

Gazaphiles like me will find much here that is familar from Gaza: restored elided vowels, contracted versions of uncontracted words, compound verbs replacing tmesis, the article and the augment brought back in, more common words (πρόβατα) replacing rare ones (μῆλα.) Gabalas strikes me as a little harder than Gaza, but then the Odyssey strikes me as a little harder than the Iliad!

I also found, as one increasingly fascinated by the art of Byzantine paraphrase, the article by Samra quite interesting. He argues that Gabalas, through very discrete changes and omissions, very lightly Christianizes Homer. I have not really seen anything like this in Gaza or Psellos. Samra makes a good point that none of these paraphrases are really translations into the vernacular, but rather they make use of a language that, like Epic itself, is somewhat artificial:

Tzetzes is as famous a Byzantine scholar as you can get, utterly unstable, a wonderfully colourful character! Incidentally, he relied largely on memory rather than textual evidence. A seriously interesting chappy. Here is Allegoriae:

He also wrote on "filling out" the Iliad with stories like the Judgement of Paris etc, though I don't believe he had access to the actual epic cycle at that point, so they're his own compositions in his own right.

Gabalas reduced the intervention of the gods to the minimum, substituting them by the rational problem solving abilities of an enlightened individual. He also excised magical elements. A very commendable article that also relates how Gabalas identified with the Odyssey because he had suffered many perils at sea, attacks by pirates, etc.

As far as I know, Moschopoulos did and amplification that deviates a lot from the Iliad (and only of some books). If you want to sample it, check Aristarchs homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos from page 486, still the main reference for Homeric paraphrases:

κῦδός σοι! $15.00 is a ridiculously low price for such a great Homeric resource.

chalimac wrote:

As far as I know, Moschopoulos did an amplification that deviates a lot from the Iliad (and only of some books). If you want to sample it, check Aristarchs homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos from page 486, still the main reference for Homeric paraphrases:

...the mother of all paraphrases changed the history of the world. I mean the Septuaginta.

There have in fact been very few translations that have changed the world. Most influential texts have made their impact in the original language. (Lenin, for example, read Marx in German.) The Top Five Translations that have changed the world.

Again, what I love about these intra-lingual versions is not that they answer questions such as these, but that they answer them in a Greek-only way, avoiding both English meta-language and English translation.

(BTW, as to the substance of the question, I find Gaza's take interesting but a little far-fetched.)